I Abhor The Idea Of

Most Of My Inspiration, If That's The Word, Came From Books Themselves.

The Point I Would Make Is That The Novelist And The Historian Are Seeking The Same Thing: The Truth – Not A Different Truth: The Same Truth – Only They Reach It, Or Try To Reach It, By Different Routes. Whether The Event Took Place In A World Now Gone To Dust, Preserved By Documents And Evaluated By Scholarship, Or In The Imagination, Preserved By Memory And Distilled By The Creative Process, They Both Want To Tell Us How It Was: To Re-create It, By Their Separate Methods, And Make It Live Again In The World Around Them.

But The Same Thing Was True In The Army. You Slept In A Barracks With All Kinds Of People Of Every Nationality, Every Trade, Every Character And Quality You Can Imagine, And That Was A Good Experience.

My Second Book, Follow Me Down Had Some Success, Got Good Critical Notices, Went Into A Second Printing And Things Like That, But Shiloh Was By Far The Most Successful Of Those First Five Novels.

Writing Is Very Hard Work And Knowing What You're Doing The Whole Time.